Jonathan Brand says “monkey bars”

[From Simon & Schuster’s About the Book page. Click for a larger view.]

My friend Fresca sent me a great find, a book of photographs by Jonathan Brand, Lower East and Upper West: New York City Photographs 1957–1968 (Brooklyn: powerHouse Books, 2018). Talk about a madeleine, or a plate of madeleines: these photographs, even if they were taken on the streets of Manhattan, not Brooklyn, bring back the world of my childhood. Thank you, Fresca.

In one photograph, a girl wears a crossing-guard sash, the same kind I wore as a member of my school Safety Patrol — thick dirty-white plastic, with a badge’s pin stabbed through (something like this one). Another photograph shows the strange supporting structures of Robert Moses swings — not chain links but long metal pieces looking almost like the bones of a human leg (as in this Getty photograph). In two other photographs, a boy and a father with a camera play on what most American speakers call a “jungle gym,” or what I always knew as “monkey bars.” (Most American speakers think of monkey bars as a horizontal ladder, a series of metal bars that you traverse hand over hand while hanging above the ground.) And I am delighted to see that Jonathan Brand refers to monkey bars, not a jungle gym, in the descriptions that accompany the two photographs:

Father photographing his son through the monkey bars, 1964

Father trying to photograph his son through the monkey bars, 1964

I found an interesting clash of the two names in a 2011 New York Times article about playground safety. Watch what happens between paragraphs:

When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan.

“I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.”

You can see monkey bars in the photograph that accompanies the article, with a caption identifying them as a jungle gym.

Like his friend Garry Winogrand, Jonathan Brand is known for street photography. I think his work deserves to be better known.

Here are two sets of photographs from Lower East and Upper West: one, another. And here, some photographs from a Brand and Winogrand joint exhibition.

Three related posts
Jungle gym and monkey bars : Sliding pond : New York words